


All The Things I Could Have Loved

by SociopathicArchangel



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga), Death Note: Another Note
Genre: Gen, honestly idk what the full list of characters is gonna be so let's just add as we go along?, tw: child abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-19
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-03-06 16:42:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13415379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SociopathicArchangel/pseuds/SociopathicArchangel
Summary: The Circus arrives without warning-or, in that really self-indulgent Night Circus AU no one asked for but is still getting





	All The Things I Could Have Loved

The boy looks up at the man, a small flickering flame cupped between his hands. He’s worked hard trying to will it into existence, only having been able to shatter things at will last week. Illusions aren’t coming to him as easily as he thought. Conjuration is even trickier.

“Good enough?” he asks, wide, eager, (red) eyes clearly hopeful.

“Hmm,” the man says, and then stubs the butt of his cigarette into the boy’s forearm. The flame immediately sputters out of existence, and the boy cries out, only managing to cut off the noise when he grits his teeth at the last minute.

The man looks down at him without a change in expression.

The boy blinks back tears, and focuses on making the small little dot of burned skin on his forearm knit back together. He is six.

It knits together thirteen minutes later, and the boy is sweating, vision doubling, but when he looks up he isn’t any less hopeful.

The man just nods and then turns away. Lesson is done for today.

Beyond Birthday looks at his hands, wondering where he went wrong.

* * *

 

The Circus arrives without warning.

* * *

 

When Beyond is seven, he learns how to heal close the cuts he is given on nearly a daily basis. It’s necessary training, he is told, because at the root of it all, this is a competition, and should his opponent get tired of him, it would be so easy to just put a bullet between his eyes. He decides he doesn’t quite like that, and makes sure he’s adept at not bleeding to death, or be susceptible to bullets. It’s half doing what the man says and half to preserve his own skin; it’s wholly practical. He finds he quite likes using this skill.

When he is eight, he learns that the easiest thing he can conjure is fire, which is neat, because fire is a weapon, so if he has this, no one can hurt him. The man just uses the flames he snaps into existence to light his cigarette, and Beyond sometimes half-wishes he could just make the fire climb high and burn hot, but punishment would be swift, and he’s not adequately proficient yet.

When he is nine, he stares at the scar on his left hand, a faint band of skin on his ring finger, and glares at it. He wishes his opponent a painful death, and wonders who they are and how they’re coming along in the same second, and then gets mad at himself for this. He still keeps staring at the band and wonders. He is a child. The other must be too. He didn’t ask for this. The other mustn’t have too. How horrible to have an existence like this, molded from birth for a senseless competition.

(“Everything is a senseless competition,” the man says, one afternoon, when Beyond has learned to choke back tears, and had just newly healed a stabbed hand. “Everyone runs around trying to get what they want first, whether it’s for necessity or bragging rights. We’re just a step up from the others. Humans are just too blind to see it.”

Beyond just looks at his still-bloody hand and doesn’t say anything.)

When he is ten, he decides whatever the competition is, and whoever he’s against, he’s going to be better than his opponent. Better than those who came before him. He knows this is not the first game that has been played. He’s going to be historical. There will not be anyone like him before or ever again.

So he practices and he learns.

He reforms melted candles and heals his burns, levitates things higher and higher every day, places them on one place and have them land on another area entirely, has his books torn to shreds and teaches himself not to cry as he fixes them page by page.

He watches the man’s shows when he can (when he’s not left alone in dressing rooms), and thinks, _I’ll be better, just you wait._

On a show where he spends four hours in the dressing room, he sets one of the man’s silk top hats on fire. When the man returns, it looks as if it’s never been touched.

* * *

 

He’s brought around from theatre to theatre in the fanciest clothes he’s ever owned. The man makes sure that he’s presentable in company, looking a bit too much like a porcelain doll made to dress up, in neat little suits and lace cravats and expensive pins. He’s taught how to smile and how to nod and how to bow and how to laugh, and how to talk and be polite. It just snowballs from there as he makes it a point to learn how to _talk,_ and have the man’s fellow performers fawn over him because he’s so _charming._

The man always glares at him discreetly over a glass of champagne. Beyond just smiles sweetly and turns to compliment someone’s dress, and is rewarded by a flattered laugh that grates on his ears but serves the purpose of pissing off his trainer.

The man never says anything about it, though.

He’s a company favorite before long, and when the man goes to perform, his co-workers always coo, _“Where’s your little boy?”_ in greeting.

The first time it happens, a vase in the room explodes into a thousand shards. Beyond acts like he’s so shy at the attention, and then laughs his ass off the second he’s in the dressing room. He spends the entire show smugly sitting in the man’s velvet-cushioned chair by the vanity, replaying his trainer’s barely-concealed horrified expression over and over in his head.

When the man enters his dressing room after the show, he’s given an impromptu lesson on healing a burnt arm. It’s still a good night, and Beyond laughs through bloody teeth.

* * *

 

When he’s thirteen and lanky and growing too tall too fast to be called cute (although still rather charming), he’s left in a hotel room, and steals a drink from the bar downstairs. One drink becomes two, and two becomes three, and he’s a sloshed thirteen-year-old giggling up to his hotel room. He nearly stumbles down the stairs and is only saved from cracking his head (he’s positive he can heal it, although what with a bleeding head and all, he’s not sure how quickly) by someone catching him and squeaking when they do.

He just grunts, and flails, and then the person – child, from the voice – says, “Stop moving, we’ll both trip.”

He doesn’t stop moving, and then suddenly, he does. More like he gets tired and his limbs slowly calm themselves, and he’s sure he can place his finger on exactly _why_ that is, but his fingers are also doubling in his vision right now.

The kid just moves and loops one of his arms around their shoulders, and then slowly walks up the stairs, telling him to do the same. After a moment, he does.

The trip back to his hotel room takes more than half an hour, and the door unlocks itself by its own volition, because Beyond forgot the key inside and locked it, and although the kid beside him looks confused, they say nothing and just guide him inside. His head tilts so that his cheek is pressed up against their hair ( _soft_ ), and they both almost stumble before he’s dumped on the bed.

He just giggles. The lights flicker.

The kid looks up, confused, and again, doesn’t say anything.

“At least take your shoes off,” the kid says, and Beyond just snorts and wiggles his feet. That just gets him a huff. “Come on.”

When he doesn’t comply, he gets a pen jabbed into his side. Albeit capped. It still hurts to be poked. He glares.

“Take off your shoes and go to sleep, dummy.”

He just rolls his eyes. His shoes fly off of his feet and hit the wall before they bounce off and roll on the floor for a bit. The kid just sighs, apparently quickly used to the weirdness.

He’s manhandled for a little while, made to crawl under the covers and then having the blankets carefully draped over him (and Beyond thinks, through his drunken haze, that this is maybe the first time someone has tucked him in), and he just stares at the kid, even if he’s not sure he’ll even remember this or them the next morning.

When his hair is gently pushed away from his face and his forehead is kissed, he thinks he can see the faint outline of a scar on the kid’s left hand, matching his, and the brief thrum of magic running under their fingertips.

* * *

 

A often wakes up with ink stains on their hands and their face. It’s mostly from writing too much and falling asleep on said writing, and sometimes it itches when they leave it on their face for entire days (because sometimes they oversleep and forget to wash it off because they’re rushing, and their instructor never tells them they have runes on their face, just carries on with the lesson like there’s nothing wrong), but on the most part, it doesn’t bother them.

It’s almost a permanent fixture, the black tips of their fingers. It’s like a little disease, they think, just festering and crawling its way up their arms and to the rest of them, and they wonder when it’ll consume them completely.

And then they shrug, pick up their newest book, and copy down what they have to, memorizing loops and patterns and meanings ( _bind_ and _time_ and _stop_ and _protect_ and _curse_ and - ) and hoping for once, their instructor will talk to them outside of, well, instructions. A doesn’t know why they’ve been picked out the orphanage, a tiny little child with no name and no identity, and only wide, wide eyes that can stare in suspicion at everything.

The occasional trips to magic shows are the nearest thing to normality they have, and they can imagine that maybe, this is like a parent-child trip to see something amazing, something fun. But A sits through the shows, sees, observes, and is asked – “What is the difference between what you do and what they do?”, “Where did they go wrong?”, “What would you _not_ do had you been on stage?”. It’s not a field trip, it’s proofreading reality and those who try to bend it with their reflexes and their charms.

They answer, as best as they can, and the copy down runes, and forget to sleep for days, but it’s fine, they can do it. Better books and a warm house and magic than a rundown orphanage and a chance at nothing.

They stare at the scar on their ring finger often, tracing it absentmindedly on some days, when they think to themself, _What’s the point of all this?_

They’ve only been able to vaguely piece together that they’re being prepared for a competition, and they don’t know what it’s about, or who their opponent is. And what the point, even? Two magicians trying to one-up each other by their students? Why not just duke it out themselves? It would certainly be more satisfying, wasting each other on the battlefield with their different approaches to their art.

But the instructor never answers questions, only gives them, and A sighs and does as they are told, and traces their scar, wondering who’s on the other side of it.

* * *

 

A lives in a little townhouse.

It’s not a fancy place, and they’re not usually allowed to go outside and only has people come in to take care of their clothes and give them haircuts (because if they had their way, they wouldn’t even pay attention to how long their hair was getting; just studying and studying and studying) but then again, the outside only has people they would rather not meet. People are loud and overwhelming most days.

They spend their mornings waking up to an alarm they’d set, written in black ink just on the corner of their headboard, that sings a tinny little melody to tell them it’s six o’clock already, and then they clean up, make breakfast, and then pore through whatever new books their instructor has brought them. There’s always new books every day, and A goes through each one with the precision of a cutting knife, going over it again and again, memorizing contents, replicating runes, mumbling intent into symbols.

They sleep late, dark circles under their eyes at a young age, and their instructor says nothing about it, so they continue and pass out on their work, and then wake up, always, always at six.

At one point, they spend days without sleep just to get through a rather thick tome and end up passing out on the floor. They get a lesson for that – exhaustion is useless and only incapacitates abilities. They bite their tongue and don’t say that they just want to catch up, because he’s giving them books faster than they can read them.

They take things a little slowly after that, which just means they sleep at midnight and at average get five hours of sleep.

“What’s the point in all of this?” they finally ask their instructor once. Like always, there’s no answer.

Eventually, they stop asking, instead turning to their books and their runes and their ink, picking apart the strokes and the lines, breaking them and fusing them together to bend their functions.

When they find a cat that’s been run over by the road, on the rare times they’re taken outside by an escort, they kneel down beside it, tears in their eyes. They take it back with them, ignoring the protests for it being unhygienic, and write rune after rune after rune until they’re crying.

Their instructor brings them books the next morning. They clearly haven’t slept, and the room _reeks_ but A’s still trying to revive the cat through tears.

Their instructor says nothing and points out a stray line. A hurriedly corrects it.

They clean their room and freshen it up and go out the next day to get food and a collar for the cat, and gladly take the responsibility of caring for it. That’s the only condition the instructor has in making it stay.

* * *

On a trip to see a magic show in a theater, A meets their opponent, and thinks he’s rather silly and sad and angry, and shouldn’t be drinking at such a young age. They trace symbols softly on his skin with their fingertips, covering it up with a kiss to his forehead, and all the alcohol leaves him, replaced with a good night’s sleep.

* * *

 

Lessons become sparser as they grow up, and by the time they’re seventeen, they’re mostly left alone to their own devices – with their notebooks and their pens and their cat – and they coop up despite the fact that they’re allowed outside without supervision. There are still things to experiment, runes to reform, footnotes to go over.

They see their instructor less and less, and when they move to London, they pick a flat in a quiet neighborhood so they can study in peace. When they forget to cut their hair for months, they tie it up before hacking it off weeks later because they also tended to forget to tie it up, and it got in the way of reading when they were hunched over a book.

It’s almost normal – as normal as things are for them anyway. They study and keep a better sleep schedule now that they know all the contents of their books by heart; they go out when they need to and exchange short pleasantries with people, they save a puppy from drowning from a river,  and they curl up by the window seat with a cup of tea whenever it rains.

When their instructor visits with a card to one Quillsh Wammy, they just sigh, and pick it up, and ask, “What is this about?”

They’re surprised to get an answer.

* * *

 

Beyond is nineteen when he lines up for auditions as a performer for a yet-unnamed circus. He has a flyer and everything, to prove that he didn’t just somehow manifest inside the building because he was meant to be there (or else the owner would probably start screaming, or maybe immediately hire him because he’s impressed, whichever – normal folk’s reactions were funny even if they were predictable), and is dressed up in his best suit (which he hates, the longer he wears it, but the man had insisted, and it’s in black and red and gold and white anyway and it looks flattering on him judging by the stares and the titters), and has been sitting for four hours in the waiting room.

The little secretary pops in every now and then to call numbers, or occasionally sits down to rest on one of the seats, and Beyond is so bored he just tries to count the threads on the laces of their shoes. They look expensive. Probably a favorite employee then.

Hack after hack after occasionally decent – if lacking – act is called and then rejected, and then the tiny secretary finally calls his number. He grunts, pushes himself off the wall, and then goes towards the curtains, hurrying his steps, obviously bored and just wanting to get it over with.

His knuckles brush against the secretary’s – the knuckles of his left hand on theirs – and the tiny little thing hurries out of the way, awkward, but Beyond feels it. That small jolt of _power_ that runs underneath their skin, raw and different from his own magic.

He glances at the secretary’s left hand and sees a scar that matches his, and his bored expression breaks, making way for wide eyes and parted lips.

And then he’s ushered by said secretary to the stage. They hadn’t seemed to notice.


End file.
